Posted by aogFriday, 05 October 2007 at 11:14 TrackBack Ping URL

It's not a fall in the historical perspective

erp wonders about the ignorance of the editors of the journalists who are lost in a fog of Disney World ahistoricity.

My friend, the Intrepid Girl Reporter, is of my age and my memory of her college colleagues (now editors and senior journalists) is that they suffered from a lot of reality dysfunction as well. It makes one think that the collapse of journalistic credibility isn’t that things are any worse, just that we’re aware of the problems.

That, however, strikes me as too simplistic a view. Let us not be ahistoric ourselves and keep in mind that not so long ago (less than 100 years) journalists were generally considered one step above patent medicine salemen. The conception of journalists as honest, well informed people is the anomalous state, the true propaganda coup of the profession. Like all Potemkin Villages, however, it was doomed to fail in time.

I think that this phase lasted longer than it would have otherwise because

• There was a much stronger concensus and a much closer alignment of Old Media and its host society, so the bias didn’t grate or matter as much.
• There was more of a sense of service to America rather than one’s own career (contrast pre and post Watergate).
• The senior editors were from the non-professional street wise era, rather than products of a reality insulated educational experience.
• New broadcast technologies were still impressive and this transferred to its Old Media users.

All of those things have changed now and I think it won’t be that long before journalists are once more on a par with thespians¹ used car salesmen and politicians.

¹ But these days, were treat thespians with even more unwarranted respect than journalists at their height, so that’s not a good analogy.